prose

2017 was a whirlwind of a year for Paloma Press! And none of what we were able to undertake would have been possible without the help of the Filipino American community and the wider network of writers, artists, reviewers and booksellers, from the Bay Area, DC, Philly, Southern Cali, Luxembourg, New Zealand and the Philippines. In our case, it really took a village to launch our books.

We hand-bind all of our books. The covers for our journals are made from 6-packs of local breweries. We’ll gather friends to help us, buy some beer and pizza, and spend a lot of time cutting boxes, and sewing our books.

The name came up out of discussions we had about the nature of publishing. It’s meant to reflect how a published work is brought to life, but simultaneously buried. With so many publishers completely uninterested in previously published work, a lot of amazing writing is left to rot after its brief moment of recognition.

While I can admire perfection, not only can I not achieve it, but it isn’t something I can engage with. The perfect poem or piece of art is on a pedestal. I am interested in text and art that rolls around in the dirt and plays.

Our indie punk / rock record label sensibility attracts creative, unique, wild and wooly individuals, each with something important to say about life and how we’re all muddling our way through it. While on different tracks, there’s certainly a common spirit. People notice this about the content we’re putting out there, and how we’re choosing to present it. We couldn’t do it without the writers. Obviously.

We like works that engage in some level of strategic play with regards to structure and language; we like writing that inhabits its own textual body with weight and force; we like autopsy reports, 17th century maps, Calvino, and poker bluffs. We’ll read anything that stinks of earth.

We started out of a framepack & computer screen tight-roping language, trying to figure out what can’t be said & how to say it. I guess the ramble can be summed up with—narcissism leading to boredom leading to community leading to fulfillment.

The press arose from our founding editors’ observation that the publishing world lacked explicitly inclusive feminist presses. There were (and are!) many excellent presses promoting women and LGBTQ writers; GGP’s contribution to the field was meant to be an explicit invitation to feminists of every gender and sexuality to consider (and/or challenge) what constitutes feminist work.

At Black Radish, coping means taking responsibility for what we want to make happen. Each member of the collective contributes directly to the funding of the press through annual dues, as well as supplying sweat equity. Recently we have shifted to having a designer to do interior layout for us, though everything else is in-house. After paying for SPD’s services, we plow all sales back into the press to pay for printing, mailing, books fairs, conferences, and readings…

You know, the typical publishing story. I was sitting in a bar in the year 2000 with some freak I knew from a miserable job I had at the time and he turned to me and said, “I want to start a press and you should be the editor because you are very outgoing.” I downed my tenth or so beer and told him that was a great idea and he could count me in. At this miserable job, I had written a novel called For Fucks Sake, and we decided to launch the press with my book. At the same time, I started dating my future wife Elizabeth, who already worked in publishing, at a literary agency. The three of us spent the next two years meeting at the freak’s apartment with occasional assorted other freaks making detailed plans on how we would publish our one book; after the meetings, we would all go to dinner and get drunk.

Sad Spell Press was almost an accident. Elle and I had both considered printing chapbooks in the future but when we read a few of the submissions for Issue 1 and realized we didn’t have the space to share the work in the mag but we did still have the ability to share it, we decided to expand our plans ahead of schedule. We chose the name Sad Spell because it was already in use as the title of our blog, so that everything written that wasn’t for an issue of Witch Craft Magazine would fall under the same title. Our Spellbook Series 1 definitely does the name of our new press justice as each author picks off little pieces of your heart in turn.